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March 27, 2005
By Sandra Scofield
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The engaging stories in Daniel Alarcón's debut
collection, "War by Candlelight," draw on Peru's violent
history, the plight of Lima's poor and the hopes of immigrants in
New York. They are finely crafted fiction, rich in feeling and images.
Alarcón, who has a particular talent for conceiving action,
builds his stories with many events played out in sequence and in
juxtaposition, varying the structures innovatively. His characters
are tested by harsh circumstances, but they are never passive. Much
of the story action happens in the streets of Lima's barrios, where
characters are on the run or on the make, and the stories are vivid
with precise details. There's a lot of artistry in these stories,
and evidence of a belief in the short story as a perfectly adequate
form for illuminating the largeness of life.
In "City of Clowns," first published in
The New Yorker, a young journalist joins a group of itinerant clowns
in order to write about their way of life. He wanders Lima begging
and learns that behind his costume he is invisible, even to people
he knows. He is interrupted by his father's death and by the discovery
that his impoverished mother has moved in with his father's mistress.
He's better at begging than he is at facing the realities of his
mother's life, something he can't do until he comes to terms with
his memories of his father.
A worse situation is the life of the characters in
"Flood," who live in a neighborhood where wretched children
roam and quarrel with petty gangsters. The story begins as a lagoon
floods, "a ribbon of gleaming water where the street should
have been." Everybody comes out to see, leading to a pointless
street brawl and a small boy's accidental death. The adolescent
narrator says of the fight, "We were blind with happiness."
The narrator's hero is in a prison the people call the University
because it's where you go when you graduate from grade school or
the Army, and soon the boy visits it himself. As strands of circumstance
cross, they become a net that traps the narrator, as all children
like him are trapped in the terrible place where they live. This
is a street-kid story without clichés, sinuous with surprises,
that reverberates with the unparticular stories of thieves and revo-lutionaries
in the cold prison and with a grim awareness of the children's future.
Several of the stories take place in New York City.
"Third Avenue Suicide" is a story about a Latino, David,
and an Indian woman, Reena Shah, who doesn't want her mother to
know they live together. When Reena gets seriously ill, David tries
to reach out to her mother. It's a claustrophobic story that takes
place in a small red room and a crowded immigrant neighborhood.
Its melancholy lack of closure mirrors the pessimism of the Lima
stories, even though the New York characters seem to have so much
more volition. Another story, "Absence," sends a painter,
Wari, from Lima to New York for a small-scale show of his work.
He only has a one-month visa, but he knows he has a chance to disappear
into illegal status in a country where doing anything might be better
than the life he has in Peru. "Leaving is no problem,"
he says. "It's the staying gone that will kill you." Wari
isn't a hero, just a guy who wants a better life, and his shallow-minded
scheming makes the story uncomfortably convincing. Alarcón
never bothers with easy sentiment.
The title story is a sprawling overview of the life
of Fernando, who is caught up in the civil war in 1980s Peru. It
has its infelicities--little slides of point of view, for example,
and a well-worn phrase or two--but more importantly it has the robustness
of a story that's really about something, and it has the arc of
a novel. It's amazing just how much Alarcón packs into the
story. There's a wonderful scene in which Fernando goes from the
provinces to Lima as a young man and his bus is wrecked in the mountains.
The bus is dangling precipitously, everyone is saved, and then they
realize there is a car beneath the bus with a trapped driver. They
are able to rescue the man, and the bus driver rushes to him, crying,
" 'My brother!' ":
"Fernando could hear the man breathing, pulling
in enormous lungs full of oxygen, replenishing himself. The man
was crying and fearful. 'Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,' he murmured.
A thin stream of blood curled from his bottom lip. The brothers
embraced and Fernando fell in love with his people."
That love is tested over the next 20 years as Fernando
learns the cruel lessons of the city and chooses what he decides
is the side of justice, even though it isolates him from his family.
Alarcón leaves the reader to wrestle with the story's implications.
In "The Visitor," a country man struggles
to begin life again with his motherless children after an earthquake.
The family makes its way over the buried town across the valley
to a place where there are sheep and goats, herbs and fruit, and
also piles of goods from parachute drops, including blankets, neckties
and oversize bathing suits. "The Visitor" is the shortest
story in the collection, and in some ways it is the most powerful,
because it so stunningly conveys a family's grief at the same time
that it reminds us of the power of the instinct to survive.
In the final story, "A Strong Dead Man,"
a boy waiting in New York for his father to die after a series of
strokes processes his grief by watching a baseball game, and he
remembers a body he once saw float down the Hudson River. Alarcón
would not have us think that all the dead or all the sorrows are
in Lima.Sandra Scofield's most recent book is the memoir "Occasions
of Sin."
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